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With gratitude to my excellent beta, cher.
The spring she was eleven, Fire learned to set traps for animals in the wood. It started and ended with rabbits.
This was contrary to her nature: Fire liked animals, such that her horse Small counted among her best friends. Nor did she need to catch her own meat for survival — her father's position of influence in King's City made it unlikely she'd ever need to provide for herself.
(But even when she was eleven, the rumours from King's City made it only unlikely.)
It was Archer's idea that she might devise a way to catch monster animals specifically. "Rabbits, or weasels, or pigeons," said Archer. "Then you can eat them when the raptors stay away."
It was kind of him. Fire suspected his true motive was to steer her away from the reading and music practice with which she'd passed the winter, pursuits he found extraordinarily boring. But it was Archer's nature to be generous, so that a suggestion which had benefit for him also had true benefit to her.
Because of her father — and especially when he was present — those who hated Fire did not call her 'monster' to her face. But monsters craved the flesh of other monsters, so sometimes they called her an eater of monsters, which amounted to the same thing.
And so that Fire might catch her own monster meat, Fire and Archer had set up traps. They baited them with salt and food and fur, combed from the monsters kept as pets around the holding.
In the late morning, they walked along a deer track together with Fire's scintillating hair bound up under her hood, and Archer's bow slung across his back. They were approaching a trap, so Fire reached out with her mind, feeling for a creature in it. She found something alive and young and exhausted. But not a monster; the slippery cunning of monster minds was absent. "I think we've caught an ordinary rabbit," she said, and began to calm the creature down so that she could take hold of it, something she knew how to do quite well. She slowed down, concentrating, and Archer moved past her on the path.
"Is that your idea of an ordinary rabbit, Fire?" said Archer.
It was not. It was white, more or less, and as she approached, holding its mind as she did so, she saw that its fur had shimmers of pink and silver. With both of them in sight, the rabbit was starting to fight her control.
Rabbit minds were more challenging than she had expected. Dogs and horses were easy, because between their feelings and actions was a certain limited logic, or at least habit, and so there was something to persuade. This rabbit had little to consider between its senses and its reactions. While Fire could deceive the senses, that was hard, and the baby rabbit was quick. It trembled.
"I don't want to kill this one," said Fire. "It's different."
"Well, it's the prettiest yet," said Archer. "Maybe you can wait until it's fully grown and make a hat out of it." Amused, he was imagining her dressed fussy and fine, precious as a child's doll.
"I might just," said Fire. "Do you think your father could tell me why it looks like a monster but doesn't smell like a monster or feel like a monster in its mind?"
So they put the rabbit in a box full of leaves, and checked the other traps, and walked back to Archer's family holdings for an early lesson with Brocker.
"We'll start with what you remember," said Brocker. It was spring, so he had met them outside, where he was writing a letter and sipping a mug of water chilled in the cold-box. "And then you can get books from the study and tell me what you find in them."
What Fire remembered fit into one or two sentences.
"Monsters can breed with the same kind of creature that isn't a monster," she said, "and the offspring will be monsters too."
"Monstrous," agreed Brocker. "Go on."
"And I suppose monsters can breed with other monsters, and make monsters, because otherwise there wouldn't be groups of them, such as the raptor flocks."
"All right," said Brocker. He glanced at Archer, who had nothing to add.
"Did you know," said Brocker, "that sometimes when monsters breed with monsters, their offspring does not appear to be monstrous at all?"
"Oh?"
"A few years ago, Donal killed a monster wolf, a female with swollen teats. He went looking for her den, and found three monster cubs, and one ordinary cub. You can ask him about it."
"What will happen if I breed my rabbit?"
"I can't tell you that — I have no idea. I'll give you some books, Fire, and you can try to guess yourself," Brocker said.
"And, if you wish, you can take your rabbit to Vetter's cottage in the morning, because he keeps ordinary rabbits, and you can ask him nicely to try to get kittens from yours."
Going anywhere, for Fire, was a somewhat complicated event: she must be guarded, from monster predators and humans who hated monsters (or loved them), and as she hated to be the cause of a procession, even a procession of two, she did not often ask. But this was surely worth it, and she accepted the escort of Donal and Athny, her father's men, on the ride to Vetter's holdings.
Vetter was one of Brocker's holders, and Fire knew that for that reason alone Vetter might agree to her request, but he was also kind, and had a daughter four years older than Fire.
"Liddy, show the Lady Fire around the pens," he said. "Lady Fire, this is my daughter. She can tell you everything about rabbits that you want to know," with a chuckle that said a lady's interest in rabbits was incongruous, but no more than that.
When it came to take the rabbit out of its dark box, Fire was suddenly shy. "It's my doing," she was forced to say, when Liddy looked askance at the glittering creature which barely twitched as she moved to pick it up, her hands in thick soft gloves.
But Liddy did not twitch, either, at this confession. "Well, I suppose that explains why it isn't dead yet," she said frankly. "Rabbits die of anxiety. Being caught in a trap and then travelling creates great anxiety. What can you do with it? Can you make it feel at ease in its pen?"
It was a shock to Fire for anyone to ask her this: from that kind of question, it was a small step to wonder about the ways Fire could make humans comfortable, or uncomfortable, because her father was so famous for the latter. Cansrel could make a person believe their fingers had just been cut off; Cansrel could make a person climb to the top of a cliff and giggle all the way down.
Liddy waited. "I can try," Fire said, cautiously, and Liddy said meekly, "Thank you, Lady Fire."
Fire returned home with her head full of information about rabbits and delight at a new friend.
And then Cansrel arrived, and she thought of rabbits not at all, and danced attendance on her brilliant, unpredictable, fleeting father.
She wrote to Liddy, because Brocker reminded her, but Liddy could not write back, and conversation between the two girls faltered.
The second time she saw Liddy, and the white rabbits, she had Cansrel in tow.
More exactly, Cansrel had her in tow. Cansrel was expecting a delivery from Cutter, but Cutter had sent a messenger ahead of him to explain that Cutter's wagon had a cracked axle, and that if Lord Cansrel saw fit, he should come to Cutter. Cutter's present camp was the yard in front of Vetter's holding.
Cansrel and Fire rode out together. Fire was in several minds about this. She hated Cutter, but wanted to see Liddy; she did not want to ride Small, her horse, towards the trader who had previously abused him; she wanted to go wherever her father was going; she did not want to watch her father take out his frustrations on anyone, even Cutter. So she spent the trip practising her lessons on his mind: creating unreal clumps of flowers in his path, or appetising smells, or birdsong where there was none. "You're becoming an illusionist, Fire," her father said, laughing. "What a delight you are," and she was perfectly happy, and the day could not be spoiled.
She excused herself away from Cutter and Cansrel as soon as she could, and asked after Liddy. Liddy, upon seeing her, gave her a warm hug, and apologised about the letters, and gave her a tour of the rabbit pens again, where four more white rabbits now lived.
These offspring were almost pure white, with only a hair here and there which was white at its base, pink near the top, and silver at its very tip. "Your rabbit has had two litters," Liddy said, "and one of them took after the bucks. The white ones were born first. I'll show you my father's breeding notebook — I was going to copy things from it, but isn't it better that you're here?" Paper was expensive, of course, Fire knew.
"Of course," she said.
But they were called in to an extravagant lunch, insisted on by Cansrel, who claimed that he was hot and weary from the ride. "We shall all have wine," he said, playful and exuberant, pleased by Cutter's offering, though he would not allow any wine served to Fire. Across the table, Liddy tipped her glass awkwardly to Fire, her smile equally as crooked, and Fire could only duck her head in apology for her father's childlike impulse.
(Later, on Brocker's advice, she asked Donal to send money to Vetter, along with a note written in the most imperious and lofty manner, thanking Vetter and his family for the hospitality, without the graciousness that might allow the gift to be refused with equal grace.)
Cansrel noticed Fire's friendship with Liddy, of course; even when influenced by something far stronger than wine, he retained a certain alertness where she was concerned. "Fire, you have a friend," he said, casual. "You need a maid, don't you?"
Fire was plunged into confusion, embarrassment, and horror, and then made elated as quickly as she had been deflated when she saw Liddy's smile, and cautious nod.
They rode home with Cansrel's purchase from Cutter: a jackal the color of distant mountains, muted gray-blue-green. He trotted obediently on a leash behind them, because Cansrel had asked Fire how it was she knew Liddy, and hearing the full story, demanded a further test of her control. So it was that she rode Small, and soothed him, and soothed the wild canid who wanted to eat her and Cansrel, and crept into bed that night half-ill with the effort. But that didn't matter, because Liddy was coming to stay with her, and Cansrel had praised her grip on animals' minds.
If only he didn't want her to use that grip on people.
And if only Brocker didn't remind her, again and again, that that was wrong; that people must only fear her, if she forced them to love her. As if she had much choice, with her beautiful, stunning, monster body and hair, about the delight that overcame most who beheld her.
When Liddy came to take her position as Fire's maid, she was quieter than she had been at home. She was wary of Cansrel — with reason — even during his longest absences — and a little uncertain as a servant in a lord's holding. But she had sympathy for Fire, if not the open friendship she had had before, and when Fire cried and her body knotted itself in fear and worry, she held Fire willingly, and asked nothing of Fire as she stroked Fire's hair.
Then Cansrel, suspicious of a kindness towards Fire that had nothing to do with jealousy, and jealous himself, sent Liddy away. What a person gave, they could take away, Fire knew that, and yet she was full to the brim of hurt that she hugged to herself, outrage that in a world where monsters had few friends, her father had banished hers.
But Cansrel had no need of friends; she was the closest he came.
Fire did not write to Liddy after she was sent away, and Liddy, mostly illiterate, was anyway busy with her new husband, and her new acres of woods to tend. But it was the spring when Cansrel banished Liddy, and in the summer, Fire received a gift for her fifteenth birthday: a cloak of stitched white rabbit furs.
It was this cloak she clung to, crying, often, in the first months after her father was gone.